Chaotic attractors

I ended the first in this trilogy of posts by posing a question: what are we heading towards? Will the transition to a new economic paradigm (the use of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain) leave us in a place of empowerment, or under a continuation of the economic slavery via debt peonage that we're experiencing under late-stage capitalism?

In a series of talks including Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham (recorded as a series of 'trialogues') the trio explored the idea of ‘chaotic attractors’: states of order situated at some point in the future, which lead events towards them as if we were all vectors on a deterministic drive towards an advanced or evolved point of organisation. McKenna pontificates:

Is it credible that perhaps the universe is a kind of system in which more advanced forms of order actually influence previous states of organisation? This is what emerges in Ralph Abraham's work with chaotic attractors. These attractors exert influence on less organised states and pull them toward some kind of end state.

If one runs with this idea, two key questions arise: can we analyse current trends and, through projection, visualise possible forms of these attractors? If there is an intelligence guiding our seemingly continuous state of chaos towards a more ordered form, where does this intelligence originate?

In Neuromancer, our protagonist Case expands his sphere of consciousness by jacking into the matrix. As he hacks through new database defences he absorbs the power of the information within those networks (very much like Elliot in Mr Robot). There is a clear progression in the book from Case as a disconnected, off-grid and atomised individual to a highly aware, jacked in group member whose power rivals that of the most advanced artificial intelligence. Each new piece of technology or data he has access to helps him act to expand the realms of what he can experience. When he begins, the matrix is a relatively simple construct. By the time he encounters Neuromancer, at the end of the book, the experience is more like a waking dream. Here I see clear parallels with the chaotic attractors of the trialogues. There is a trend towards increasingly complex forms of order emerging from the chaos.

Microdosing - bringing order from chaos

There is more information coming to light recently about the potential cognitive benefits of micro-dosing on psychedelics. I have dabbled myself and I must agree with the reports of higher mood and enhanced states of creative flow that many have been able to achieve whilst under the influence of minute doses of LSD. It comes as no surprise that, in articles such as this, there are anecdotal reports of the use of psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms in tiny doses to give an advantage to tech industry workers in Silicon Valley.

The link between tech innovation and acid trips is not new, with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both having cited experiences with the drug as influential. Hopefully, more evidence will continue to emerge(that is scientific rather than anecdotal) to provide data that might back up the reports. Already, pioneering brain scans (as described in this article done in 2016 on a subject under the influence of LSD showed that “psychedelics increase communication between parts of the brain that are less likely to communicate with one another, and decrease communication between areas that frequently do.” This could be a massive advantage in the competitive tech start-up industry, where every company wants the sharpest and most innovative minds on board to help them get to that 'next big idea' before their competitors. And what is the hottest new tech trend in which an edge could turn a huge profit? Blockchain.

Fungal Architects of the Crypto Revolution

Blockchain technology is one of the most dynamic and innovative technologies of the moment. From Bitcoin’s fertile soil there have sprouted over a thousand new cryptocurrencies. Some work using the Bitcoin blockchain framework (or an adapted form of it - such as Litecoin).

Many more work using Ethereum’s smart-contract based platform which allows a greater versatility and a huge number of applications. Beyond that, there are IOTA and Nano, which use yet another innovative structure, more eco-friendly due to the lack of resource-heavy ‘mining’ for coins for the creation of a public ledger.

The depth of this field is mind-boggling. If you are struggling to get your head around Bitcoin, it might be surprising to hear that in cryptocurrency circles it is widely regarded as an outdated technology. I consider myself tech-savvy and I still get lost in the innumerable technical terms that have arisen around the technology. A cognitive edge in this sector could be a great help, and it makes me wonder how much of the coding for these applications is being done under the effects of micro-dosing.

One of the more ambitious projects using blockchain is Golem, which is building a supercomputer harnessing unused computing power from nodes on the network. They boast of the technology: “It can never be owned by anyone.”

The claim may be true, but this project reminds me eerily of the A.I. named Wintermute in Neuromancer, which via an "Internet of Things”- type mechanism (one of his more prescient depictions of our technological future) is able to kill members of the Turing police using a gardening robot. Ironically the police officers' remit is to take down A.I. that break the 3 laws of robotics and become too powerful to be allowed autonomy. Whether A.I. of this level of malevolence and self-awareness is possible is a point of great debate, but the infrastructure will soon be there to allow such an agency to have real consequences in our physical world.

Returning to the meat-locker

What are the implications of this when we go back and take into consideration Paul Stamet’s claims on fungi being the architects of our existence? Are we moving towards a technological singularity via a psychedelic-assisted digital financial revolution? I don’t make any proclamations here - it is just personally fascinating to explore these ideas and I offer them to you for discussion in the comments section.

According to Moore’s law, the pace at which technology is increasing in complexity is exponential. It would seem that this is driving us towards a technological singularity... or is the singularity pulling us towards it, like a chaotic attractor? I see the implications of the law going far beyond the physical and material based notion of the doubling of transistors. This is symbolic of an exponential rate of change that is evolving the human experience away from the corporeal sensation towards a dissociated virtual-reality based existence, minimising the human connection. The human experience as detached from meaning physical sensation is more like a dream. We cannot exist purposefully without the physical balance to our mental life, so perhaps that will be the chaotic attractor that sucks us through time towards the enlightened state of harmonious balance on a personal, social and planetary level.

I’ll leave this on one last quote from Neuromancer. There is a definite pullback at the end of the book where it seems that Case and other characters such as the artificial personality construct Dixie Flatline realise the frugality of a purely digital existence, ironically devoid of connection.

It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, to the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

Life imitates art – tech and drugs in Neuromancer

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

So begins the visionary futuristic novel Neuromancer on which I commented in previous posts, linking it with the topic of cryptocurrency. The book continues to amaze me with further reading. I see disconnection as one of its less obvious themes but one which is prominent in my mind and explains the choice of imagery in Gibson’s opening line. What use is a television when it is only tuned to static, devoid of a signal, of meaningful connection?

The other theme which I have been drawn to is the drug use and psychedelic imagery scattered throughout the story. Many of the characters use chemicals to alter their consciousness: perhaps to escape the void of human connection that seems all-encompassing in this dystopic future world.

The holodeck/cyberspace/the matrix: a network of all the world’s digital information visualised in increasingly complex virtual reality constructs as the story progresses. It has a definitively trippy description throughout. A corporate virus named Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is visualised as

‘filling the grid […] with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as snow crystal on a winter window.’

The quality of Gibson’s writing puts me in the mindset of an acid trip and he has admitted to using LSD during the writing process. The lead character Case loses his ability to jack into the matrix after he’s dosed with some psychedelic mushrooms. One of the by-products of the mushrooms is a mycotoxin which inhibits his ability to visit the life-like visualisations of networked data where he has made his reputation as a “console cowboy”, or hacker. Interestingly, LSD was discovered after studies on a fungus called ergot. Lysergic acid, from which LSD is derived, is a mycotoxic ergot alkaloid.

That infamous scene in the Matrix (which borrows heavily from this book) where Neo is offered the red/blue pill can be seen as an offer to come out of a lower state of consciousness and be introduced to a higher perception of reality in which the field of visualised data experienced until then is seen as it truly is: “What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” The difference here is that Case tries throughout to undo the effects of the mycotoxin and return to his reality, however simulated it may be. This leaves us questioning which the hallucinations are: the effects of the psychedelics, cyberspace, or our physical day-to-day reality?

Do androids trip on electric mushrooms?

In this fascinating podcast mycologist Paul Stamets talks about how the biggest living organism on the planet is a honey fungus spreading under the ground for 3.8km. How did the fungus get so big? Unsurprisingly it is put down to natural selection and Stamets explains brilliantly (from about 7:20 in the show) the process of a fungus adapting over millions (or even billions) of years from exposure to microbes in its ecosystem.

He goes on to say: “We have 5 or 6 skin layers that protect us from an infection. The mycelium only has one cell wall. On the other side of that cell wall are hundreds of millions of microbes per gram [of soil, many of which are trying to consume it], the mycelium is able to upregulate and in constant biomolecular communication with its ecosystem be able to prevent predators from consuming it, thus allowing it to achieve the largest mass of any organism in the world.” Stamets also variously comments on the state of organisation which enables this ‘fungal intelligence’:

'[Fungi] are the architects of our existence';'They have more neural connections in the mycelial mass, over a thousand acres, than we have in our brain. They are accumulating knowledge-like intelligence';'I call them earth’s natural internet';'...massively resilient adaptive organisms that have a network-based design: not dissimilar from that of our neural networks; not dissimilar from the computer internet.'

Does this remind you of anything? I see great parallels between this and the A.I. constructs as they are depicted in the cyberspace of Neuromancer. If you were to ask me a year ago what were my thoughts on non-human intelligence, I would have answered with a few vague mutterings about perhaps there being a possibility of higher plant and animal intelligence than we can presently conceive. Oddly, considering the age of rapidly advancing technology and space exploration that I have grown up in, I would not have spent long pondering artificial or extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Since listening to the conversation mentioned above – and having my mind blown - I have come to accept a much greater role for fungal intelligence in our human evolution. If fungal intelligence predates the human, which predates the artificial, I am left questioning whether this all comes from the same source.

Psychedelics as a technology of consciousness

The examples that Stamets lists for possible symbiosis between fungi and humans (let alone the knock-on effects of their symbioses with the plants and animals) include the discovery of penicillin, the transporting of embers to recreate fire, and the treatment of consumption. Would it be accurate to describe psilocybin mushrooms as a technology, given that they have enabled us realise so many new developments?

The Collins dictionary definition of technology is “methods, systems, and devices which are the result of scientific knowledge being used for practical purposes.” Some of the benefits we have realised through the use of fungi could be described as such, whereas others seem to happen without us realising at all, or by chance. I for one would love to see some studies on micro-dosing - the potential harms and benefits – and whether it could be a legitimate tool for cognitive enhancement in technical fields. I will discuss this further in the final post of this trilogy.

Terrence McKenna's hypothesis (as critiqued here) about the role of psilocybin mushrooms in the development of human language as well as evolutionary advantages in hunting and mating are yet to be further developed scientifically. This is not surprising - to say McKenna was 'out-there' in his field would be a vast understatement. His closest peer in this respect is probably his brother, Dennis McKenna, who focuses his studies on the pharmacological side of psychedelics. He, along with pioneers such as Robert Carhart-Harris (leading the aforementioned LSD brain scans) and Rick Doblin of MAPS (working on clinical MDMA trials for PTSD) being at the vanguard of scientific discovery in their field.

Due in large part to the war on drugs progress in this area was stagnant for decades, although now it seems that it’s only a matter of time until ideas like those of Terrence McKenna can either gain traction or be discounted. The neurogenesis that Stamets attests to in the podcast, as well as potential cancer-fighting properties of culinary Turkey Tail mushrooms and boosting of immunological defence, are other areas of study that could have great potential.

The End is Nigh

It doesn't seem such a crazy thing to say any more, does it? During the preceding year the pessimistic end of the spectrum of thought has become a lot more palatable to even the least switched on humans. Being one of them (human, in case you were wondering), the questions I've been mulling over as we approach the end of another year in the post-truth world are: "the end of what?"; and "how soon is nigh?".

It suddenly hit me. No... not suddenly. It was actually kind of slow and grinding, but over the course of just one morning. My bullshit tolerance level is at its lowest for some time, so taking on corporate barista work in the City of London was a way of rapidly becoming unhinged. Enveloped in the microcosm of depressive insanity that is the in-house café at a corporate law firm, I was holding up surprisingly well. That is - until the Christmas music started.

It's not that I don't like celebrating a co-opted pagan/shamanic tradition in the name of consumerism, I'd just rather do it on the actual date, not 3 weeks prior. I don't blame the rest of the staff - they just wanted something to look forward to, and who can blame them... compelled to habitually wake up at an unnatural hour, commute in total darkness to a sterile work environment where they re-enact a humdrum routine of preparing excessive amounts of out of season produce for a clientele who would, at this time of year, rather work from home (or maybe they were just eating somewhere else).

What could possibly be driving such an insane pattern of behaviour? Money, obviously.

I'd maybe have been down with it, too, if it was the right kind of money. I spent my break time watching the ever fluctuating price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I'm sure I was the only one. It's a fun game to play, especially if you have 'skin in the game', or are 'HODL-ing' the electronic currency yourself. The price of these new digital stores of value is up and down like a roller-coaster at the moment, and this immense volatility is one of the biggest obstacles of their adoption as a method of exchange. Why would you spend money when it's going to be worth more tomorrow?

Conversely, why would you earn money in a currency that will be worth less tomorrow? Because it's been the only option. That might be about to change.

Bitcoin: the Origin Story

Let's put any value judgment on the idea of cryptocurrencies aside for a moment, and look at where they came from. Aptly for a currency that allows users to be pseudonymous, Bitcoin was invented by someone going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. There are many possible identities for Satoshi, but we know he/she authored a paper in a cryptography mailing list called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" in 2009.

From Bitcoin's website: "Bitcoin is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. From a user perspective, Bitcoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet."

How does this differ from digital fiat currency that we use in online banking and credit card transactions? It's all in the phrase "decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) payment network". Before I'd heard of this, the first and only place I had experience of P2P was in file-sharing. Back in the day, when Napster was invented, and later with Bit Torrent, we gained the ability to share data with other users rapidly by bypassing any centralized servers to get the files we wanted. Sure, this lead to huge upheaval in the music industry due to copyright infringement, but P2P technology was alive and in widespread use.

This technology has evolved and now is applicable to monetary transactions. This appeals especially to anarchists - and aptly Bitcoin was primarily used to transact in the black market for most of it's lifespan - but it could have benefit to anyone who realises that centralized manipulation of fiat currencies is disempowering. The critical adjustment comes from the use of triple-entry transactions. From financialcryptography.com:

"Triple entry is a simple idea, albeit revolutionary to accounting. A triple entry transaction is a 3 party one, in which Alice pays Bob and Ivan intermediates. Each holds the transaction, making for triple copies.To make a transaction, Alice signs over a payment instruction to Bob with her public-key-based signature [3]. Ivan the issuer then packages the payment request into a receipt, and that receipt becomes the transactionThis transaction is digitally signed by multiple parties, including at least one independent party [4]. It then becomes a powerful evidence of the transaction [5]."

The applications of the technology extend far beyond Bitcoin. The blockchain (an un-tamperable ledger of transactions) is set to change the way you transact with others in almost every part of your life. If you have time to go deeper on this I recommend this TedX talk which contextualizes these developments.

The End Is... Crypto?

I'm not suggesting that Bitcoin is going to defy market forces and experience a continuous rise in price. There are no guarantees it will keep rising, and certainly at the current moment it looks to be a crazy bubble that many are comparing to the Tulip mania of the 1630s. Nevertheless it's impossible to deny the upward trend in interest and adoption of this and other new cryptocurrencies (or 'altcoins', of which there are already over a thousand) that has occurred in the last few months. The hyper-deflation that the Bitcoin economy is experiencing seems ludicrous, especially when you look at how little can actually currently be bought with them. We're so used to our fiat currencies and the ever decreasing spending power (inflation) that has come with their use. During my lifetime there has been nothing else. But what would a world look like in which cryptocurrency use was the norm?

As I mentioned in this prelude, cryptocurrencies are entering the zeitgeist in more ways than one. In the techno-thriller TV show "Mr Robot" (spoiler alert), the lead character Elliot Alderson orhestrates a global financial reset, crippling the E-corporation's financial enslavement of the population by destroying all records of their debts in fiat currency. In the chaos following the event, the citizens of this quite conceivable dystopia are forced to barter, or else use cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is mentioned as a rival to the E-corp's emerging 'E-coin'. The show is gripping not just because of it's great writing, acting and production but for it's conceptualization of a post-fiat, post-debt world.

Hacker culture is explored in Mr Robot in a way that's more true to life than any TV show or book I've experienced before, although in many ways it reminds me of William Gibson's cypherpunk classic 'Neuromancer'. Often cited as the inspiration for the movie 'The Matrix' (there are many parallels) and the origin of the phrase 'cyberspace', the premonitions about cryptography and currency are also striking. One can't help wondering at this point whether we can complete the triangle linking 'Mr Robot'/crypto with 'The Matrix': Mr Alderson/Mr Anderson? If you watch the scene where Elliot is cornered in his office by the FBI you might doubt the coincidence. There is even an altcoin called Neo!

Towards a Tokenized Economy

Fiat currency is government issued and not backed by a real world commodity. Manipulation of the value of the Pound through expansion of the money supply and centralized control of interest rates has been the Conservative party's economic strategy since Thatcher was in power. The other political parties have followed suit.

We have an economy plagued by intermediaries and centralised control. For me, the EU referendum was moot: when asked to choose between which centrally manipulated and corrupt economy I wanted to be a part of, I had no answer as the choices were leading me into the same dead end.

When the dying nature of our current paradigm truly hit me, I was making coffee for corporate lawyers and solicitors (intermediaries), getting paid by an employment agency (an intermediary) in a currency issued by a central bank to a commercial one (who make most of their profit acting as a financial intermediary) in order to pay rent on a property via... you guessed it... another agent.

How long will it be until all of these intermediaries are obsolete? There are already startups developing systems that may revolutionise the distribution of energy, event tickets, personal data to name just a few fields.

Maybe the proximity of my workplace to the Bank of England, the hub of this manipulation of money, was a catalyst to my thought. Maybe it was just time I trusted my gut (I've been insisting on the end of our economic paradigm for some time, but up until recently I convinced myself there would be a huge crash). The absurdity of the situation - making yourself miserable, doing a job that doesn't need doing, to earn a currency you don't believe in - suddenly struck me. I had to get out of there.

The current system as we know it is changing. This is the end that is nigh. But what are we heading towards? Will it be better or worse? Or will it be the same - just another form of economic slavery? I'm going to expand on these development in human economic interaction by linking it to the worlds of psychedelics and the evolution of consciousness. Until then, here's a beautiful cautionary creation by loop pedal extraordinaire Mike Love (not forgetting his percussionist friend).

In all the wash of propaganda and diversion that surround the election, it is easy to forget the items the politicians have left off the agenda (which might be why they did it!).

Today there was an article in the mainstream media showing results from a study regarding the use of psychedelics with regards to mental health. This sort of research is vital in changing public opinion on the issue of our denied right of sovereignty over our own minds and consciousness which is propagated by the 40-50 year blip in human history of psychedelic prohibition which we call the War on Drugs.

This also seems like a good place to repost the article that started this website off for me (in its original incarnation), in order to launch the Psychedelicacies part of the new design:

Today is my birthday.

I have now completed twenty five orbits of our fair celestial overlord – known to many as ‘the sun’.

So what? It’s just a day, isn’t it? And what has even changed since the beginning of that quarter-century of cycles? SELF IMPORTANT, MUCH?

I can certainly account for the presence of one molecule within me today which was notthere on that fateful day in 1988, when the womb of my Mama cast me asunder. If you were to count back a further 21 trips around the sun, you would be back in 1967, amid the swell of the wave that would later be dubbed ‘The Summer of Love’. Relevant? Absolutely – for the alien matter that found it’s way into me today was none other than LSD-25 (Lysergic acid diethylamide to its friends).

I speak about this drug as though it made the decision to enter my body, and not the other way around. As if it possessed some third party agency. As if LSD ‘chose’ me. Whether it was my own energy that manifested this strange chemical into my possession, or a sequence of lucky events, or the invisible guiding hand of the Spirit of Timothy Leary, one thing’s for certain: I was the one who chose to eat it. Well… actually I licked it off a spoon.

It was the only way to go about it – a small amount of the LSD solution dropped onto a borrowed utensil (which I decided I should probably not return, certainly not without a good clean) had been way more than I would be needing. I used a pipette to transfer as much as I could back into the original container, leaving a tiniest smear of the solution, which I then chose to ingest. What followed was about 10 hours of peaceful contemplation, a rampant creative output that is unmatched for me with any other substance, and the blissful appreciation of a series of beautiful moments (remarkable only in the sense that I would otherwise not have bothered noticing them).

So… what has urged me to share this experience with a host of potential friends, family members and internet strangers? It is neither big nor clever to boast of drug use, and any insight into the drug’s effects can only really be known by taking it for oneself.

Well, dear reader, I am making a stand. I am coming out of the closet.For those of you who might be thinking “Ah, I thought old Nick would turn out to bat for the other side”, HOLD ON.

This closet is a different one. It’s filled with bright, luminescent colours. Time behaves differently inside it. It’s not sexual… it’s psychedelic. I am a tripper. And proud.

With this admission comes a declaration… The War on Drugs is OVER.

It might not seem like it; what with people being arrested left, right and centre for the possession and supply of drugs; and with new drugs being banned every year; and with the mainstream press continuing to run misinformed scare storied about most illicit substances. But it most definitely is.

How do I know that? Because despite it being 46 years since the Summer of Love, where LSD use was at a peak, and 48 years since it was banned in the UK (deemed as dangerous as heroin), it is still available.

It was made available to me – somebody without many connections, without the knowledge to synthesize it themself, and who didn’t even have to leave the house – solely by virtue of having an internet connection. And it was delivered to my door by the postman (a regular postman, not a part-time postman who also deals acid, though I’d love to find one of those). And this route of attainment can be used for virtually all illegal drugs. Not only can you now get almost any illegal drug at high quality and without having to leave your home (anonymously, through black market websites), but it is also possible to buy an ever increasing range of legal analogues for much cheaper. LSD alternatives, and ones for most other categories of drug, are sprouting up quicker than they can be legislated against. Technology has developed to the point where the authorities do not have a hope.

The supply of drugs will not dry up unless the demand does the same. And it hasn’t. Humans will always want to alter their conscious state using drugs. They have done it for thousands of years, using sacred plants found in nature. That desire was not about to stop because some politicians in a room somewhere made a decision that it was dangerous and even morally wrong. The prohibition is the anomaly. And now it is being outsmarted.

So it is over. Anybody still arguing for prohibition is just out of the loop and unaware of the reality of the easy availability of all manner of substances legal and illegal, even after nearly 50 years of the ‘war’. Anybody still making arrests in the name of the ‘war’ is just playing out a meaningless skirmish in a battle that has already been lost.

As a drug user, I’m going to be reporting from the front lines on some of the feeble last attempts at public control to be made in the name of this ‘war’, as well as discussion on the role of consciousness expansion in society and random associated tidbits from psychedelic culture. I felt like I had to pick a theme for the blog, but there will also be general discussion, a bit of a music and comedy somewhere down the line, and a few political ramblings in so much as they’re tolerated.